Outdoor Advertising (also known as “Out of Home” or “OOH”) is a segment of the advertising market that utilizes a variety of technologies to communicate advertising messages to consumers in public spaces, including the familiar outdoor billboards located next to freeways. Digital Out of Home (“DOOH”) is a relatively new segment of OOH that utilizes digital displays connected to networked computers, allowing for an “online-like” advertising system. Online, Addressable TV, and Mobile advertising systems are other forms of digital display advertising well documented in prior art.
Network owners responsible for providing, maintaining, advertising space on DOOH signs have traditionally used manual surveys to establish audience metrics associated with the signs, including estimations of quantities of consumers that have had an opportunity to view the sign, estimations of demographic makeups of the consumers exposed to the sign (e.g., a measure of central tendency of the makeup, such as a mean, median, average, and so on), and so on. These traditional methods are time consuming to develop, not very accurate, and model averages associated with consumers over (1) long periods of times (e.g., years) and (2) large areas (e.g., all, or a large quantity of, shopping malls in the US for a mall DOOH operator). As a result, DOOH model is typically low-value “run-of-network” and the credibility of determined metrics, accordingly, is low. Systems that can improve on any of the above-described deficiencies can deliver benefit by improving accuracy of determined metrics and better utilize the DOOH inventory.
In other patent applications previously filed by the present inventor, various methods for characterizing DOOH audiences using mobile phones as a proxy for the consumer exposed to the DOOH signs were described. Some of these described methods relied on identification of the mobile device in close proximity to the DOOH display to estimate audience counts and characterizations.
Particular mobile phone operating systems may periodically transmit a “phantom” WiFi Media Access Control (MAC) address (e.g., randomized MAC address) that is not the actual WiFi MAC of the device. This disclosure describes systems and methods to optimize the audience count and characterization in light of this.